The Director for Tema Ports, Tebon Zuma, says nurturing the youth to discover their talents should be a top priority for Ghana.
The Northern Debaters forum, a “baby”of the Director has become the breeding ground for grooming young talented youth in the Northern part of Ghana to realize their future dreams.
The grand finale of its 2024/2025 Inter-School National Debate competition, brought together some of the brightest young minds from secondary schools across Northern Ghana to deliberate on the region’s most pressing challenges, including poverty.
The highly anticipated debate final which took place on Saturday, January 17th, 2026 in Bolgatanga witnessed Sawla Senior High School emerge as winners in the competition.
This year’s competition focused on the provocative and timely motion: “The Fight Against Poverty in Northern Ghana is a Lost Battle.” This challenging topic required the students to critically examine poverty alleviation efforts, development initiatives, and the socio-economic realities facing Northern Ghana, encouraging deep analysis of both the progress made and the obstacles that remain.
Participating Schools for the finals were ;
Bolgatanga Girls Senior High School, Tamale Girls Senior High School, Sawla Senior High School and St. Francis of Assisi Girls Senior High School
These schools distinguished themselves throughout the competition but in the end it was Sawla senior school which took the trophy.
Director for Tema Port, Tebon Zuma promised to do everything in his power to ensure more youth, particularly, in the Northern Region unearth their talents starting with the Northern Debaters Forum.
“Northern Debaters Forum is a local NGO that is focused on promoting debates in our second cycle institutions and also public speaking . We started in 2002 but launched it in 2003 . We have been organising debate competition, drama and poetry but we extended it to the various parts of the region in 2024/2025 and we got winners for the various regions and what you see today is the climax of that efforts.
“We believe we have to nurture the young ones because some of us have benefited from debating clubs in our Secondary School days and we felt that we need to bring this also to our younger onse to benefit from it”.
Tebon Zumah , who is also the Executive Director of the Northern Debaters Forum, continue to champion the development of critical thinking and public speaking skills among young people in Northern Ghana.
